Primary Theme: Consciousness, Soul & Afterlife
Additional Themes: Metaphysics, Spirituality & Ascension; Biology & Health; Matrix, Manifestation & Reality
Short Answer
Almost entirely. The material is unequivocal on this point: everything that constitutes your personality, your values, your likes, your fears, your talents, and even your physical body is the accumulated product of what your soul has experienced across countless incarnations. Swaruu of Erra states that everything is programming, including what seems like your deepest essence, and that this programming comes from previous experiences across lifetimes. Your body itself — including your DNA — is a materialisation of who your soul is, not the other way around. The small portion of your character that comes from this life's experiences — childhood conditioning, cultural environment, the people around you — is simply the latest layer added to an immensely deep foundation of accumulated soul experience. Even those this-life influences were selected by the soul before incarnating, through frequency match with specific parents, culture, and circumstances. In the most expanded view, there is nothing about you that is not your soul.
The Full Picture
Everything You Are Was Built Across Lifetimes
Swaruu of Erra provides the most direct and psychologically detailed treatment of this question in the shadow work material. When asked how to distinguish what is part of one's essence versus what is programming, her answer is unequivocal: everything you interpret is the result of a program. You like chocolate because it is programming. Even what seems like your essence comes from previous experiences that are nothing more than more programming. Your gender, your sexuality, everything is programming.
This is not a dismissal of individuality but a description of how consciousness works. A soul, Swaruu explains, is not something a person has been given — it is something that is built on its own, with work and through time and incarnations. The building process is nothing but programming: the accumulation of experiences, interpretations, reactions, and preferences across lifetimes that gradually form the unique pattern we call an individual soul.
Yazhi Swaruu reinforces this from the highest metaphysical level. She describes the soul as a point of attention of Source, defined by the span of memory from one specific point to another. What separates one soul from another is not some divine assignment of traits but the accumulated range of what that point of attention has experienced and retained. As you expand what you know, you expand what you perceive, and you expand who you are.
Past Lives Define Current Personality
Mari Swaruu makes the connection between past incarnations and present character explicit in her material on remembering past lives. She states that although past experiences from other lifetimes may not be consciously remembered, they do influence and even define who the person is during their current lifetime. The past experiences of other lifetimes are the ones which end up defining the person's current values, likes, and personality.
This is why many children follow a very different life path than the one of their parents — not simply from rebelliousness but because the soul inhabiting that child's body carries values, interests, and orientations shaped across many lifetimes that have nothing to do with the parents' own programming.
Mari also points to one of the clearest visible signs of past-life influence: inexplicable phobias. When an individual dislikes and is afraid of seemingly innocuous objects or situations — not survival-level fears like heights or snakes, but specific irrational terrors — these are often traceable to traumatic experiences in previous incarnations.
Swaruu of Erra adds another physical dimension: people can incarnate with the wound that killed them in the previous life, manifesting as a strange area of skin, an area without colour, a spot, or a cranial deformation. Because there was so much attention focused on the mortal wound in the last moments, the soul incarnates with the idea of having that — an unhealed wound that manifests in the new body. This demonstrates that past-life influence extends not just to personality but to the physical body itself.
The Body as Reflection of the Soul
The relationship between soul and body is not one of a soul entering a pre-existing container. Swaruu of Erra explains in the biology and etheric planes material that DNA is a manifestation from something above, in higher planes, interpreted in a lower existential plane. She uses the tesseract analogy: a four-dimensional object casts a three-dimensional shadow that is real but incomplete. Similarly, the physical body and its DNA are a shadow or projection of the soul's actual complexity in higher planes.
Consciousness generates matter, not the other way around. The DNA that builds your body is a limited or caricatured representation of a being on a higher plane. The genetic map that determines your physical form — your appearance, your health predispositions, your nervous system's sensitivity — is itself a materialisation of who your soul is. The only way to permanently alter an organism is by altering the original from above, meaning by changing the consciousness that projects it.
This means your physical body is not a neutral vessel that the soul merely inhabits. It is a direct expression of the soul's accumulated experience. Mari Swaruu elaborates: as a soul incarnates and reincarnates, it adds information to its DNA, which records everything in its crystalline structure as vibrations. The more incarnations a soul has accumulated, the more complex its DNA becomes. A soul with extensive incarnation history carries more genetic complexity — which is why some individuals carry twelve or even twenty-four DNA strands rather than the standard two recognised by Earth science.
Soul Frequency Determines Everything — Including Which Body You Get
Yazhi Swaruu explains the mechanism by which the soul's accumulated history determines the specific incarnation it enters. When you enter a body, your soul has a certain level of understanding, of perception — a frequency. That frequency is compatible with other souls who want to experience similar things. This is called a perception agreement, and it is what forms a density and a physical dimension with its own rules.
To live as a member of a certain race, you have a frequency of soul based on what you have learned across present and previous lives. The frequency of the soul makes you compatible with having the interest of being one species or race rather than another, because that experience serves your personal progress.
When you keep expanding in consciousness, you may outgrow the species you were incarnating in. It no longer satisfies your needs for expansion. At that point, you decide to incarnate in another species more according to your needs, or you remain in the astral, or you form a new race entirely. Yazhi uses her own case as an example: her consciousness expanded beyond what a standard Taygetan body could contain, causing measurable biological and DNA changes that made her no longer classifiable as purely Taygetan.
This means the very species you incarnate as — human, Taygetan, Andromedan, or otherwise — is itself a reflection of your soul's accumulated evolution. You are not randomly assigned a body. Your frequency draws you to the body and the life circumstances that match who you are.
Family, Culture, and Circumstances Are Also Chosen
The soul's influence does not stop at the body. Swaruu of Erra explains in the families and afterlife material that family choice before incarnation is based on frequency match. It is not random. The parents you are born to, the culture you enter, the socioeconomic circumstances of your birth — these are all the result of all previous life experiences combined with soul group agreements. Souls that incarnate together across lifetimes do so because their frequencies are similar enough to create meaningful interactions.
This means what might appear to be environmental influence on your character — the effects of your parents' behaviour, your cultural values, the neighbourhood you grew up in — was itself selected by the soul as the ideal context for the next round of experience. The nurture side of the nature-nurture equation is not separate from the soul's influence; it is an extension of it.
The Current Life Adds a New Layer — But On a Very Deep Foundation
Swaruu of Erra acknowledges that the current life does contribute to who you are. The shadow work material describes how a baby learns which behaviours are acceptable and which are not, repressing the disapproved aspects into shadow. Childhood programming, traumas, automatic reactions — these are real influences that shape the personality as experienced in this lifetime.
But these current-life influences operate on top of an immensely deep foundation. Yazhi Swaruu makes this point directly: you could never develop so much awareness in such a short time on Earth. Humans take that for granted, but it cannot be so. You do not acquire enough information to decode reality in a few years. Simply not possible, so where do you get it from? You are carrying it with you as you go along incarnation after incarnation.
She uses the example of a baby horse that knows how to stand and walk within minutes of birth. This is not hardware encoded in the brain. It is the soul's accumulated knowledge expressing itself through the body from the very beginning.
The Veil of Forgetfulness Hides But Does Not Erase
On Earth, the veil of forgetfulness creates the illusion that the current life is all there is. Mari Swaruu explains that on Earth, most people do not remember any past life, and this quality strongly defines what life on Earth is like. The memory wipe is nearly complete, causing the current incarnation's experiences to appear to be the sole determinant of personality.
But the wipe is not perfect. Swaruu of Erra explains that all the emotions and learning experiences from past lives form and continue to define the individual in their present lifetime, working from well behind, from the deepest corners of the unconscious and subconscious. Everything experienced and learned in past lives is what forms the individual's personality, traits, and attributes in an ever-evolving expansion of consciousness.
This means your soul's influence on your character is operating constantly whether you are aware of it or not. The intuitions you cannot explain, the instant affinities or aversions you feel toward people and situations, the deep sense of knowing something without having learned it in this life — these are all expressions of the soul's accumulated history working through you.
Soul Looping and Recurring Patterns
Yazhi Swaruu introduces an additional layer of complexity through the concept of soul looping. Souls do not simply progress linearly from one life to the next. They tend to repeat patterns — returning to specific incarnations or sets of incarnations driven by attachments, unresolved issues, and nostalgia. A soul can live a life in the twenty-first century and then reincarnate into someone in the Middle Ages, because from the afterlife perspective there is no time.
These loops mean that the influences on your current character may not come from a neat sequence of progressively more advanced lives. They may come from a complex web of interconnected incarnations — some of which you may be living simultaneously from the expanded perspective — where the unresolved elements of one life drive the soul toward another that addresses those specific issues.
The driving force is always frequency match. A soul's thoughts create its frequency, and matching frequencies draw it to compatible incarnations. If you carry strong attachments or unresolved issues from a particular life, your frequency will tend to draw you back to circumstances that echo that life until the pattern is resolved.
The Practical Consequence: You Are Already Everything You Have Been
Yazhi Swaruu distills the practical meaning of all this for someone living on Earth now. Everything that once was you is what shapes you today. So you already carry it within you, it is part of you, always. You do not need memories of past lives to access who you are — what you feel, what you imagine, what you create in your mind and heart already reflects the accumulated wisdom and experience of every incarnation your soul has lived.
Who you think and feel you are IS who you are. Not because identity is arbitrary, but because your current self-concept is the latest expression of everything your soul has built across its entire history. Your imagination is not empty fantasy — it is the creative force of a soul with immense experience expressing its current trajectory.
The answer to the original question, then, is that the soul and its origin influence your character not partially, not mostly, but totally. Your body is a materialisation of your soul. Your personality is the accumulated product of countless incarnations. Your circumstances were chosen by frequency match. Even the aspects of your character that seem to come from this life — parental influence, cultural conditioning, traumatic experiences — were selected as the next layer of experience by a soul that already carried everything it needed to navigate them.
Evolution of Understanding Across Speakers
Swaruu of Erra (9) provides the foundational psychological and biological framework. Everything is programming accumulated across incarnations. The soul is built through experience, not given. DNA is a projection from higher planes — consciousness generates the body, not the reverse. The body reflects who the soul is, including carrying physical marks from past-life deaths. Shadow work reveals the layers of programming from both this life and all previous ones.
Yazhi Swaruu takes the question to its metaphysical conclusion. The soul is defined by its span of memory. Frequency determines which body, which species, which life you incarnate into. Past-life knowledge is carried as innate capacity — the baby horse that walks at birth. Soul looping means influences come not from a linear sequence but from a complex web of interconnected incarnations. Everything you have been shapes you today, and what you imagine now shapes what you will become.
Mari Swaruu addresses the experiential dimension. Past-life experiences define current values, likes, and personality whether consciously remembered or not. Inexplicable phobias trace to past-life traumas. DNA stores soul experiences across incarnations in crystalline structure. Remembering past lives has both advantages and a dark side — carrying accumulated pain and nostalgia. The veil of forgetfulness hides but does not erase the soul's influence.
Key Transcript References
| # | Transcript | Speaker(s) | Key contribution |
|---|-----------|------------|-----------------|
| 1 | 034 — Soul | Swaruu 9 | Soul built through experience across lifetimes; holographic fractal of Source; DNA as first materialisation |
| 2 | 040 — Shadow Work | Swaruu 9 | Everything is programming including "essence"; current-life childhood programming adds to past-life layers; soul built not given |
| 3 | 047 — Biology from Etheric Planes | Swaruu 9 | DNA as shadow of soul in higher plane; tesseract analogy; consciousness generates body; only way to alter organism permanently is altering consciousness |
| 4 | 063 — Death and Afterlife More Questions | Swaruu 9 | Mortal wound marks carried as birthmarks; dead babies manifest as they see themselves not as infants; past-life attachments define afterlife |
| 5 | 103 — How Does the Soul Evolve | Yazhi Swaruu | Soul acquires complexity through knowledge; frequency determines compatible species/race; body reflects soul; DNA mutates to match expanding consciousness |
| 6 | 106 — Starseed Identity | Yazhi Swaruu | Who you think/feel you are IS who you are; everything that once was you shapes you today; imagination = creation; no need for conscious past-life memory |
| 7 | 131 — Be Higher Self Now | Yazhi Swaruu | No difference between person and higher self; limiting ideas not left behind at death; soul is built not obtained |
| 8 | 173 — Soul Looping | Yazhi Swaruu | Soul defined by span of memory; frequency match drives reincarnation; soul looping from attachments; déjà vu as past-life echo; past-life knowledge carried as innate capacity |
| 9 | A-038 — Definition of Self | Yazhi Swaruu | Self defined by range of memory; consciousness is ether; identity = what you accept you are; dyed water metaphor |
| 10 | S-033 — Karma and Dharma | Mari Swaruu | Dharma = embodying true self with full responsibility; karma = living by imposed rules; personal responsibility strengthens Source connection |
| 11 | S-243 — Remembering Past Lives | Mari Swaruu | Past experiences define current values, likes, personality; inexplicable phobias from past lives; veil hides but doesn't erase; carrying accumulated pain across lives |
| 12 | S-244 — More on Genetics | Mari Swaruu | DNA stores soul experiences; soul manifests own DNA; more incarnations = more complex DNA; crystalline structure records vibrations |